Local SEO Reporting Comes To Life With Google My Business Bulk Insights Data Download

My Frustrations With Local SEO Reporting

One of my biggest frustrations with Google My Business Insights was the inability to export data from the dashboard. Since we provide monthly reporting to our Local SEO clients, we were basically taking screenshots of data and putting together percentage comparisons based on previous month’s emails. In order to send comprehensive local SEO reports to clients, we were engaged with a very labor intensive reporting workflow.

I’ve always wanted the ability to download the GMB Insights data so we could, over time, create local SEO charts, graphs, and trend lines. And it looks like somewhere around April 19th (less than 2 weeks ago), Google released “Download Insights” to the Google My Business dashboard.

Local SEO Reporting & Insights

Now that we can download Google My Business Insights, I feel like new life has been breathed into the world of local SEO data and reporting.

Currently, you only have the ability to download data timeframes as follows:

7 days

30 days

90 days

Customized range (not more than 90 days back)

And the current set of data points that you get with the Insights download are:

Total searches

Direct search (branded)

Discovery searches (non-branded search)

Total views

Search views

Maps views

Total actions

Website actions

Directions actions (requests for directions)

Phone call actions

For example, upon downloading all of our local SEO clients Insights data, we quickly saw that one of our dental practice clients generated over 1,200 phone calls in the last 90 days… WOW!

How we plan on using Local SEO Data & Reporting

Downloading Local SEO Data Monthly

Here at Bipper Media, we’ve already added a monthly calendar task to download the last 30 days of data for all of our clients.

As we download the last 30 days of data month over month, we’ll gain powerful insights into the true productivity of our local SEO efforts for clients.

We already know, as an example, that one of our personal injury law firm clients increased their case count 50% year over year as a result of their increased presence in Google organic and local search results. But this data was derived mostly from the call tracking and sales reporting from within the law firm.

Our data can show the increase in traffic and rankings for the personal injury law firm, and the GMB Insights showed the 7, 30, and 90 days of overall productivity on calls, non-branded search, website click thru’s, etc…

But now that we can download the data and record the data sets month over month, we’ll now be able to produce trends lines, graphs, and charts that correlate directly to the business impact our local SEO work is having on our clients. So we plan on downloading the data each month for each client, and then finding creative ways to use that data to present value.

Local SEO Graphs, Charts, & Trends

The Google My Business Insights downloads as a CSV file to your computer. So I’ve already started a Google Docs Spreadsheet where I’m copy the Insights from the CSV file over to the Sheets.

This data is already valuable because I quickly see performance metrics for all of our local SEO clients in one place. I can sort each of the columns from highest to lowest, or sort our clients alphabetically which allows me to group clients that have more than one location.

Overtime, however, is where the data starts coming to life. Once we figure out how to isolate one client’s Insights, track their performance overtime, and present that data in one place or one report, then we’ll be providing exponentially more valuable reporting to our clients.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one report that shows you the growth of phone calls over time; the growth of traffic from non-branded keyword phrases, and the growth of people requesting directions to your business… all in an easy to read graph, chart, and trend line?

That’s exactly what we’ll be doing, but at scale, for all of our local SEO clients… and this is now possible as the result of being able to extract the Insights data for our local SEO clients from Google My Business.